Newly Enforced Youtube Terms Have Creators Scrambling

Hang on for a minute...we're trying to find some more stories you might like.

Email This Story

Send email to this addressEnter Your NameAdd a comment hereVerification

YouTube has earned its place in our society. Everyone has their own personal favorite kind of YouTube video. A single video about a cat playing with a ball of string could end up leading to a video about the how the Civil War got started. To put it simply, YouTube has many different videos, but a recent set of rules have been causing problems in the Youtube community.

The newly enforced rules, recently earning the term “Advertiser Friendly Content” involve a set of rules that are meant to help create content that is better for the Advertiser. These terms state that content that is not “Advertiser Friendly” include Sexually suggestive content, Violence, Inappropriate language, or mentioning of sensitive content. The punishment for breaking these rules is that the video becomes demonetized, meaning that the video does not earn the channel owner money. This has some Youtubers worried that Youtube may have taken money away from their account without them knowing.

One of the first videos made about the new rules was made by Philip DeFranco, a YouTuber with over 4 million subscribers and a creator on Youtube since it began in 2008. The video, called “YouTube Is Shutting Down My Channel And I Don’t Know What To Do,” has gained nearly 5 million views at the time of writing this article. In the video, DeFranco talks about how many of his videos have been demonetized recently. After the video became popular, other YouTube channels found out they were missing money as well.

Channels such as TheYoungTurks, a channel focused on reporting the news, have reportedly lost money on over 100 videos. Other channels such as Boogie2988, an extremely popular channel with over 3 million subscribers, had 4 videos talking about suicide and suicidal thoughts flagged as being too negative. Rob Dyke, a YouTuber known for talking about horror content, was flagged in multiple videos for its content, though most were talking about real life events. Even the Vlogbrothers, who we watch in this school for their series called Crash Course, had a few of their videos demonized as well.

It has recently come to light that these terms have been in place for a while, but YouTube has only recently given the creators the ability to regain the ability to make money from the video, as well as notifying creators of when they lost this video. The main problem of these rules has been the idea that YouTube had been taking away money from content creators without them knowing, and are only now allowing them to appeal to have monetization returned to their video.

YouTube has, at the time of writing this article, not given a formal statement in regards to everything that has happened in recent weeks.